Skirmishes

I am now on my third character that is getting into skirmishes. So far, I’ve had Almazar, my Guardian, and also my Warden, complete the Skirmish Starter quest and get into Skirmishes. Now, with my hunter, I’m having to go through this again. I have 6 other alts. This madness has to stop.

No, I’m not talking about my alt-aholism. I’m talking about having to find an area with enemies of the right level, killing enough of them to get the 10 War Orders and then the Target List, going back to the Skirmish Captain, and then going through the two intro instances. Finally, after all that, I can finally take part in Skirmishes with my characters. What is it about Turbine that they sometimes feel as if they need to gate something extremely cool and fun (*cough* level 35 mount anyone *cough*) with something boring, useless and time consuming.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do think that with my first character, the intro skirmishes where important and necessary. In fact, I could even see the argument being made that they are important with every character, as they will give me a feel for how that class plays in skirmishes. However, the war orders quest? Come on!

Here is my suggestion Turbine: Get rid of the War Orders quest, or at least set it to once per account. Perhaps you could have a check box so that people could opt out of doing that quest. If not, could you please explain why we need to do this quest to unlock Skirmishes?

I hit level 30 the other night with my hunter, and thought “Woohoo! Skirmishes, here I come!”, but then I realized that I would have to complete the starter quest and actually groaned “Not again….” That’s not fun for me. To make it worse, when I did finally convince myself to get out and do the quest, I had very bad luck with the drop rate. Grrrrr.

All that being said, I still love the Skirmish system. I think that my play style is perfectly suited for them, and in fact, Almazar has gained most of his levels though Skirmishes since the launch of Siege Of Mirkwood. Mind you, I don’t think I could level EVERY character through skirmishes, but it’s still a great diversion from questing.

See you in game!

EDIT: jwbarry posted the following on the thread that I had started on the LOTRO forums:

For an upcoming patch/book the quest has been streamlined to always drop with every kill. It’s not being removed because it serves a story purpose to help tie skirmishes to the real world, something very important because Skirmish Join untethers that. Having a story tie is important with a lack of a physical tie.

The second (and really primary) reason the quest exists in the first place was to distribute access across the land rush of Mirkwood opening and, while allowing everyone access to skirmishes, putting in a bell curve distribution on the density of that access, thus making the servers as happy as possible. We decided this was better done through a quest with random drops that the player had some control of, than just assigning each character a random delay arbitrarily. Tying it to the account will likely not happen. With the changes it’s been reduced to a guaranteed 10 kills, you will get a drop with every monster, so it’s fast enough to move through as you’re doing other things.

This sounds like a good compromise. I think that originally, my post was written in frustration after having horrible luck with drop rates trying to get the War Orders. Although I still won’t be having fun when I run it through with my alts, at least it is guaranteed to only take 11 kills (hopefully it will be 100% drop rate for the Target List too!) so this is definitely something I can live with. Thanks for thinking ahead, Turbine!